Why is a marketing plan important for a start-up business?

Setting up and launching a new business can be an exciting and busy time, so it’s tempting to jump right in to the middle of things, without properly planning your actions.

Whilst this may work in the short term, to have the greatest chance of success, it’s important to take time to plan what you want to achieve as your business progresses.

Part of your work will be marketing your product or service to potential customers and there’s several benefits to putting together a marketing plan to help you achieve your goals. We’ve put together some of the main ones below, just in case you need a little more convincing! 

Helps you understand your customer

Taking the time to put together a marketing plan allows you to think about the attributes of your ideal customer. Once you know and understand this, it makes it a lot easier to plan your marketing activity and how best to reach your target audience with your product or service. 

Allows you to set measurable goals and objectives

Having a marketing plan in place will give you the chance to write down your goals and objectives, which in turn will keep you more aware of meeting them and how to achieve this. If your business is more than just you, it also allows everyone to be on the same page and be clear about what you are trying to achieve. 

Prevents rushed decisions

Having a strategy and structure for marketing in place means there’s less chance of going off in the wrong direction, chasing the latest new trend that may not help to actually meet your business goals. It helps to keep everything on track, and allows you to plan your activity to align with key events of the year, which may be relevant to your business. You will likely have limited time and budget to complete marketing, so you want to ensure you’re spending it on worthwhile actions. 

Helps to keep track of your successes

Writing down your marketing actions ensures you keep a clear record of what has been done and means you can also monitor your successes, and those things that didn’t work quite so well! This in turn means you can assess your activity against return on investment and plan effectively for future years, knowing what does and doesn’t work for your business.

There are just a few of the benefits of having a marketing plan, especially for a new business!

If you are in Somerset and have a business idea or a startup that is less than 12 months old, or you're looking to re-start trading, then take a look at our Somerset Startup Package which gives you free access to a number of different online workshops, including marketing planning, as well as 1-2-1 mentoring.